Sunday, May 17, 2015

Did Commandos Make a Difference?

RAN Beach Commandos

What of the “supersoldiers,” the Western commandos who often
operated in conjunction with local resistance fighters and garnered so much
attention both from contemporaries and from posterity? What was their impact?

Their dramatic contributions cannot be denied. Heroic World
War II special operations have provided rich inspiration for a long line of
books, movies, and television shows, ranging from Alistair MacLean’s The Guns
of Navarone (1957) and ABC’s The Rat Patrol (1966–68) to Hampton Sides’s Ghost
Soldiers (2001) and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009). One would
have to have a heart of stone not to chortle over escapades such as that
carried out by two young SOE officers wearing German uniforms who in 1944
kidnapped a German general on Crete and drove him in his own staff car through
twenty-two checkpoints to a hideout and an eventual transfer by sea to Cairo.
But was this mission worthwhile? The loss of one general did nothing to shake
the German hold on Crete. The loss of the brilliant field marshal Erwin Rommel
might have been more significant, but an attempt by British commandos to kidnap
or kill him in North Africa in 1941 was a “total failure” that resulted in the
loss of thirty valuable men.

Similar questions of cost-effectiveness could be raised
about many other equally daring exploits. As could questions of morality.
Operations in occupied territories inevitably subjected the local people to
savage retaliation by the Germans or Japanese. They also implicated Britain and
America in actions that were denounced by their enemies as “terrorism”—with
considerable justification. Was it worth it?

Field Marshal Slim, one of the most respected commanders of
World War II, wrote that “special units and formations . . . did not give
militarily a worth-while return for the resources in men, material, and time
that they absorbed.” He thought they were positively deleterious because they
skimmed off the best men from ordinary units, thereby lowering “the quality of
the rest of the Army.” Slim famously concluded, “Armies do not win wars by
means of a few bodies of super-soldiers but by the average quality of their
standard units.” Another British soldier groused about “anti-social
irresponsible individualists” who contributed “nothing to Allied victory” and
“who sought a more personal satisfaction from the war than of standing their
chance, like proper soldiers, of being bayoneted in a slit trench or burnt
alive in a tank.”

Similar thinking was prevalent in the senior ranks of all
the Allied armies at war’s end. Stalin naturally rushed to disband partisan
formations that were not fully under his control and therefore could pose a
threat to his regime. The Red Army and NKVD secret police were to spend several
years after World War II suppressing nationalist guerrillas in Ukraine, the
Baltic Republics, Poland, and other parts of the Soviet empire. In Britain, of
all the special formations created during the war, only the Special Air
Service, Special Boat Service, and Royal Marine Commandos survived and that
only after an interregnum. (SAS was deactivated in 1945, reactivated in 1947.)
The U.S. Marines, with their strong sense of egalitarianism, had disbanded
their Raiders even before the war’s end and would not field discrete special
operations forces for another sixty years. The U.S. Army likewise did away with
its Rangers. They were briefly revived during the Korean War, then disbanded
again, until being reactivated again for good in 1969 to fight in Vietnam. The OSS
also was dissolved after the war but had a faster rebirth as the CIA in 1947.
The “unconventional warfare,” that is, guerrilla warfare, mission—which before
World War II had been performed by a combination of militia and regular
soldiers on an improvised, ad hoc basis, and during the war had been carried
out primarily by the OSS—was divided in the postwar era between the CIA and the
Army Special Forces, which were established in 1952.

The post-1945 record thus reveals initial skepticism about
the utility of special forces followed by their begrudging acceptance and
eventually an enthusiastic embrace in the post-9/11 era. This ambivalence is
not hard to explain. While the limited use of such operatives in World War I,
most notably T. E. Lawrence, had been almost exclusively positive, the record
in World War II was more extensive and more mixed. Missions behind enemy lines
gathered valuable intelligence and kept enemy troops tied down on internal
security duties. But raids also suffered heavy losses and left civilians
vulnerable to retaliation. Even when successful, such pinpricks seldom had much
of an impact on the course of the campaign. When asked after the war about the
impact of the French Resistance on the German war machine, Armaments Minister
Albert Speer scoffed: “What French resistance?”

There were some sabotage operations that really hampered the
Germans. In 1942 Greek partisans with the aid of the SOE blew up a portion of
the Athens–Salonika railway that carried supplies to Rommel’s Afrika Korps,
hampering its retreat after the Battle of El Alamein. In 1943 an SOE team
disguised as students on a skiing holiday blew up a Norwegian heavy-water plant
that was needed for Germany’s atomic-bomb program. In 1944 SOE agents in France
replaced the normal axle oil in a train used to transport German tanks with an
abrasive grease that gums up the works. This helped delay for seventeen days
the arrival of a Waffen SS armored division in Normandy at the start of the
Allied invasion. All those operations, and a few others, had genuine strategic
significance. But such examples are rare.

Against these successes must be weighed the more numerous
failures, such as the infamous commando raid on the French port of Dieppe in
1942 or, on a lesser scale, the SAS attacks the same year on the Libyan port of
Benghazi. In his rollicking memoir, Fitzroy Maclean, an aristocratic British
diplomat turned soldier, described how he and a few other SAS operatives,
including Randolph Churchill, were successfully escorted eight hundred miles
across the desert to Benghazi in a specially modified Ford station wagon by the
Long-Range Desert Group, only to find that, apparently having gotten advance
warning, the Italian garrison was on its guard. They had no choice but to sneak
out of town. On the way home, their vehicle overturned and Maclean woke up from
a morphine haze to find himself with a “fractured collar bone, a broken arm and
what seemed to be a fractured skull.” After recovering, he participated in
another, even bigger raid on Benghazi that likewise caused scant damage to the
Axis but inflicted considerable casualties on the SAS and its supporting
forces. Maclean was lucky to escape what another participant called “a complete
fiasco.” On a subsequent mission, David Stirling, founder of SAS, was captured
by the Germans and spent the rest of the war a prisoner. To its credit, the SAS
did manage to destroy nearly four hundred German and Italian aircraft on the
ground. This was a serious but hardly mortal blow to the Afrika Korps, which
could not possibly have been defeated save by the employment of conventional
force.

Part of the problem in the war’s early days was that
training and doctrine, coordination and planning for special operations were
still in their infancy. Early operations were often amateurish. But even the
more professional forces at war’s end still had a high rate of misfires. The
Alamo Scouts, a small American outfit engaged in reconnaissance missions behind
Japanese lines in the Pacific, was unique in having no fatalities. Most
special-warfare units suffered heavily. Britain’s commandos, for example, saw
nearly 10 percent of their men die in action—a far higher rate than in the
regular army. Civilians in the areas where irregulars operated paid a
particularly stiff price. Ray Hunt, an American guerrilla leader in the
Philippines, concluded that his efforts were of “great value to the American
army in the latter stages of the war,” but he nevertheless wrote that “the
Filipino people would have been better off” had there been no uprising because
so many of them “were killed, maimed, despoiled, and brutalized.” Hunt knew, of
course, that the Filipinos would have been liberated eventually by the U.S.
Army even if not a single guerrilla had taken up arms.

Perhaps the most important impact of behind-the-lines
operations was psychological. Special operations were a bonanza for
propagandists who portrayed every mission as a triumph against overwhelming
odds—whatever the facts. (Fitzroy Maclean wrote after one of SAS’s forays into
Benghazi, “We were gratified to find ourselves and our operation described in
the popular press in such glowing terms as to be scarcely recognizable.”) The
fighting spirit of the Western publics was thus boosted in dark times as was
the pride of occupied peoples who were led to believe they had aided in their
own liberation.

From the Western perspective the latter consequence was to
prove a mixed blessing. Proxy armies are always difficult for their sponsors to
control—often impossible. By arming and aiding indigenous resistance movements
(SOE alone distributed a million Sten submachine guns around the world), Allied
operatives were in many cases putting guns into the hands of people who would
soon turn on them.

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About Me

Mitch Williamson is a technical writer with an
interest in military and naval affairs. He has published articles in
Cross & Cockade International and Wartime magazines. He was
research associate for the Bio-history Cross in the Sky, a book about
Charles 'Moth' Eaton's career, in collaboration with the flier's son,
Dr Charles S. Eaton. He also assisted in picture research for John
Burton's Fortnight of Infamy.
Mitch is now publishing on the WWW various specialist websites combined
with custom website design work.